1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an optical character recognition device for effecting a character recognition process for ordinary documents such as English documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in a character reading device such as an optical character reader (OCR), the location of characters to be recognized, the size of the characters, the line pitch and the like are previously programmed or specified by an operator, and then the character recognition process is effected. That is, the OCR is used to recognize characters on the document whose location and size are previously specified.
However, in recent years, an OCR is developed which detects the line location of a document on a sheet on which the location of characters and the like have not been specified previously and then recognizes the characters based on the detected line location and the like. With this type of OCR, since the line location can be directly detected from the document to be recognized, the character recognition process can be effected even for sheets on which various documents with different layouts are written.
With an OCR which can detect the layout (physical positional relation) of the documents on the sheets, a plurality of sheets on which various documents with different layouts are written, are processed in batch. During the process, since the layout of the document written on the sheet to be processed is not displayed, it is difficult for the operator to grasp the layout of the document. Further, the progress of the character recognition process for the document is not displayed, and therefore it is required to successively inform the operator of the progress of the character recognition process.